Web analytics raise the curtain on your brand’s story.

What are web analytics? They help you collect, measure, and report on data, so you can understand how your website — the primary venue for your brand story — is used by customers. With insights surfaced from site analytics, improving your website performance becomes informed, not guesswork.

Web analytics reveal visitor, navigation, and traffic patterns that tell you how well your brand story excites and informs your audiences. Analytics today go far beyond bandwidth usage and server load data that your IT team manages. Advanced site analytics help marketers by organizing vast streams of visitor and referral data, traffic and site navigation patterns, and more into crisp visualizations and detailed metrics reports.

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Recognize your site visitors.

Can you tell the difference between high-quality leads, web bots, bouncing prospects, and avid brand loyalists? What are visitors telling you with their onsite activities? Web analytics using the capabilities of Adobe Analytics let you segment your audiences using distinct personas, based on traits and site behavior. Web analytics also help surface loyalists, so you can create site experiences that will reward their loyalty.

The Segment IQ capability within Analysis Workspace, for example, analyzes millions of data points to instantly show you the differences between audience segments. This saves you time and effort by revealing how your high-value customers interact with your site compared to everyone else.

You can use those insights to drive smarter marketing decisions. Data on unique and returning visitors lets you know what content is driving your more engaged users. Data on entrance and exit rates reveals which pages were the first and last visited and can flag potential points of user dissatisfaction.

Know where and when visitors come to your site.

Referral data reveals who is more connected to your brand story. For example, “no referral” tells you that your site URL has been bookmarked, entered directly into the address bar, sent as a link via email, or accessed another direct way. Direct access to your site often indicates an avid follower.

When you want to examine site traffic for a specific period of time, you can refine your analysis using the Date Range Comparison feature. It helps evaluate your site performance during a day, week, month, or user-defined date range. For instance, when your site goes through an update, you can view the impact the update has on traffic patterns after the change.

What are visitors’ site experiences when they arrive? How do they move from first touch on your site to your Thank You page? When buying a pair of hiking boots, for example, a customer may take several clicks of research, a few clicks for comparison shopping, a few clicks for sizing and pricing, and then a specific path through the purchasing process. To ensure a smooth experience, you need to understand those pathways.

Cohort analysis lets you compare your first-time users with your repeat visitors to tailor apps to their distinct wants and needs. You can measure the retention of new and acquired users with side-by-side segmentation and comparison.

There is potential treasure in the navigation paths visitors take. The Next Page Flow report displays navigation data with a quick and easy way to see which pathways customers take and where fallout is occurring. The treasure that you uncover can help shape decisions around page layout, site design, and — at a deeper level — product categories and offers. You can use these insights to improve your overall site performance.

If you aren’t analyzing how your content is accessed by your audiences, you won’t understand what they seek.

Find opportunities within the data.

If you aren’t analyzing how your content is accessed by your audiences, you won’t understand what they seek. Web analytics help you focus attention on customer behaviors and traits, revealing opportunities that are otherwise hidden. On the flip side, you can change the parts of your story that don’t attract the audiences you want.

The Search Engine Report, for example, helps you to see which providers are most often used. You can turn that data into higher rankings for the specific domains your customers rely on for search results. For a deeper view, site search data provides greater visibility into your customers’ search activities. You can uncover opportunities to engage visitors and drive them toward conversion.

Data visualization surfaces consistent demand for certain content, while capabilities such as Anomaly Detection help you immediately determine when a one-off behavior doesn’t follow common patterns. If an element to your story stops resonating, you can investigate potential reasons.

You can measure interactions for any page element, including images, media, site section, and more. Once those interactions are identified, you can tie metrics to revenue, conversions, and other business objectives. User session data within Adobe Analytics goes beyond basic visit metrics, allowing you to create a more rewarding version of your story by analyzing data points such as:

Downloads

Video starts

On-page social shares

Product reviews

Use of add-on tools (calculators, polls, and so on)

These data points all contribute to a granular view of your audience. With analytics tools such as Activity Map, your key metrics inform decisions around which content should be prioritized on your website.

Visually reveal the humanity.

Data visualization is a core feature of the Adobe Analytics toolset. You can create and customize visualizations that will allow you to make decisions based on a deeper understanding of your audiences. Dashboards and reports delivered in vibrant color allow both data scientists and non-analysts to gain critical insights about your audiences, segments, and individual customers. When combined with customer and marketing analytics, site analytics generate a real-time illustration of your audience, as you reveal the humanity behind your data.

Shape web analytics to fit your business.

Better decisions come from better analysis. And better analysis results from looking at the key performance indicators that drive your business, not everyone else’s. The robust toolset within Adobe Analytics lets you customize the metrics you report on to suit your individual needs. For example, inside the Analysis Workspace, the Freeform Analysis tool allows you to combine dimensions, metrics, segments, and date range in any combination, with unlimited breakdowns and comparisons, to answer questions at the speed of thought.

Share your site analytics.

Not all of your stakeholders are data scientists. So you need to make sense of your website data for them. That’s where web analytics become even more powerful.

Inside Adobe Analytics, you can generate routine and ad-hoc analysis using the Analysis Workspace. You have the ability to manipulate any out-of-the-box report to suit your needs. Analysis Workspace also gives all users in your organization access to workspaces and dashboards filled with the information that matters to them, when they want it.

Adobe Analytics lets you create customized reports and perform specialized analyses in Microsoft Excel seamlessly with the Report Builder plug-in. Report Builder allows you to import real-time digital analytics, so you can combine data from multiple sources and easily create customized visualizations for specific business or user needs. Even more valuable is your ability to use Custom Variables to send string or numerical data, so you can share more customized tracking.

Site analytics play a role in your bigger story.

Web analytics reveal the value your website is providing within your brand story. And as part of a broader analytics strategy, you can do even more with your data. You move from hindsight to foresight by connecting your site analytics with customer analytics, mobile analytics, marketing analytics, and predictive analytics.

Without site analytics, you’d be left wondering how to best share your brand story with your high-value audiences. But with informed decisions surfaced by website analytics, your story can become more compelling, more rewarding, and more sustainable.

Adobe can help.

Adobe believes the next web frontier is customer intelligence. Website metrics from Adobe Analytics move you closer to that destination by amplifying your brand’s story to the right audience, at the right time, in the right location. The result? A more meaningful, human connection between your brand and your customers.